


Jokes, Puns & Codes

by Magik3



Series: Kitty told me to name this series [7]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Cute, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-18 20:37:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11882346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magik3/pseuds/Magik3
Summary: Doug is learning to make bilingual puns with Illyana. Warlock is quoting Russian poetry. Kitty and Illyana are passing notes with increasingly complex codes in them.





	1. Pun 1: Eggs and Liars

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to go in the "Tops & Tails" piece as interludes, but I realized it's not explicit, so it's out here for anyone who wants to avoid the completely explicit stuff. 
> 
> If all goes well, at least one more pun and more binary code will be added. Full disclosure: I don't speak Russian, but I took a year of it in school. Anything I got right is probably due to having a good friend with a degree in Russian to whom I owe many thanks.

_How does every Russian joke start?_   
_By looking over your shoulder._

#

Russian will always be my first language because it is so comforting, so beautiful to my ear and my mind. In Limbo there was a spell so I could speak in Russian and be understood. It was one of the only kindnesses Belasco showed me and I think he did not intend it to be other than practical.  
  
And English, unfortunately not my second. The second language that I gained fluency in is a high demon language. It it used for incantations and meditation and sometimes for ceremonies that most humans would not want to attend.  
  
S'ym taught me to swear in low demon and to recite certain obscene poems. But I don't do that in front of humans. Too scary. The sounds are all coughs and growls. It has a lyricism to it, but it's not kind to our ears.  
  
Professor Xavier gave me English one night while I slept. All at once.  
  
More accurate to say that he gave me the words and the grammar, he tried to give me the meanings, but languages are emotional, they must be, and telepathy is not. I had only a lexicon, without the feelings behind it. I sounded fluent but always I was stumbling around in the words, struggling to say what I really meant.  
  
Piotr would only speak Russian with me when we were alone. He wanted me to practice my English. But Doug and Warlock both spoke Russian to me. Warlock is charmingly, eloquently confusing in Russian and would quote lines to me from poets that I loved. One night after we’d all been hanging out just talking and passing around popcorn, Warlock quoted Marina Tsetaeva and almost made me teary:  
  
_We never stopped you, companions for marvelous hours_  
_Poverty's passions, the impoverished meals we shared_  
_The fierce bonfire's glow_  
_And there, on the carpet below,_  
_Fell stars. . ._  
  
But then he managed a week later to get me laughing so hard I ran into the side of a doorway when, after a long danger room training session, he quoted Anna Akhmatova’s line: “Hail! Hail to thee, O, immovable pain!”  
  
I think Doug was teaching him humor, mostly by example. And Doug was working on his bilingual English-Russian puns.  
  
For the first of these, Kitty caught us howling with laughter in the kitchen one morning. Doug was bent over the table and I leaned against the fridge, holding my sides. Warlock was at the stove in an apron, of all things, with his eyes wide and sensors out in confusion.  
  
“What’s funny?” Kitty asked.  
  
“Doug offered me some of his eggs,” I said and fell to laughing again.  
  
“And she said she’d rather I was lying,” Doug offered while trying to catch his breath.  
  
“Do you get this?” Kitty asked Warlock.  
  
Warlock gave her a multi-limbed shrug.  
  
“In Russian,” I gasped out, trying to clarify. “Eggs is like … balls.”  
  
Doug picked up the explanation, “The Russian word for ‘balls’ is a diminutive of eggs. I asked her ‘Do you want to share my eggs?’”  
  
Kitty nodded, but she didn’t look amused enough for how funny it was, Doug offering to share his balls with me. Too early in the morning for her? Maybe she didn’t yet understand that balls are inherently funny in every language, but more funny in Russian.  
  
Doug went on, starting to chuckle again, “And she said, ‘I can see your offer is honest, but I’d rather you were a liar.’ In Russian, the word for ‘liar’ is also a pun on … um.”  
  
“This,” I said and pointed at my crotch. “But not polite. Very not polite.”  
  
_Vaginavulvasnatchpussy?_ Warlock suggested.  
  
I remembered the time, a few months ago, when Warlock and I ended up asking each other all sorts of questions we weren’t set up to answer. His were mostly about the interplay of emotions and sex. Mine—at least the easier ones—were about English sexual slang. He’d quoted a line from a racy English song of the 1600s: “A pretty young kitty she had that could purr. Twas gamesome and handsome and had a rare fur. And straight up I took it and offered to stroke it.” Which made us laugh on and off for the rest of the afternoon, and helped me understand why and how people used the term, “pussy.”  
  
But now I was laughing so hard that I sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall. “If you … translate Пизда … as pussy, as in also meaning, but not meaning cat …”  
  
Doug looked at Kitty, said, “Oh” and turned extremely red.  
  
Kitty crossed her arms. “Do we really need to have a talk about punning my name with words for genitals? Because I will go on at length about objectification of women. At length.”  
  
“Yes please,” I said, and then seeing that some of her anger was real, sobered myself. “Katya, you know you are my everything. But Doug offered me to share his balls and I would much rather have you in every language.”  
  
“You are all juveniles,” she declared and spun out of the room.  
  
“Crap,” Doug said.  
  
But Warlock had his sensors out and said: _friendKitty inhallwaylaughing._  
  
“How do you get away with that?” Doug asked me.  
  
“Boobs, probably. Balls are funny, but boobs are hot.”


	2. Code 1: Ily

Our habit of passing coded notes started before the notes themselves, on a cloudy Sunday, with a conversation about names.  
  
We were studying with the door open. Most of us left our doors open during the day when we weren’t cramming for a test or having an emotional meltdown. Kitty and I had gotten in the habit when we were fourteen and not quite so together. We kept it up because it would be too hard to explain away the change. And anyway, no locks, so what was the point.  
  
Today no one came by. The whole mansion felt sleepy and by mid afternoon I was yawning over my books. That was one of the dangers of studying in bed. Kitty had the desk across the room from my bed, which is our only desk. We didn’t have room for more than one unless we gave up the dresser and we were not giving up the dresser.  
  
She turned around to look at me. “If my name is Katya in Russian, does yours have an English version?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“That you’re willing to tell me?”  
  
I’d figured this out a few years ago, after Limbo, but not that long after, and had to remember it. “Well, the more common version of my name in western Russia and the countries around there is Ulyana. That comes from Juliana, from Julian. So I think Illyana would be something like Jillian.”  
  
“Oh. You’re definitely not a Jillian.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
Kitty glanced at the open door and waited to make sure no one was walking by before she said, “Kind of a cute Julian, though. I mean, if you were a boy, which I’m glad you’re not, but you’d be cute.”  
  
“But if I were a boy, I’d be Nikolai. Perhaps, though, Nikolai Yulian Rasputin. I think you’d call me Nik or maybe, in the right mood, Yuli.”  
  
“I might anyway,” Kitty said, grinning. “Nik and Yuli are adorable. How do I spell Ilya in Russian?”  
  
I waved her over and she sat next to me in my bed. I wrote on a blank page in my notebook: Иля  
  
And also because she would ask in a minute anyway: Ильяна  
  
She ran her fingers over my name and its diminutive. “Where did the little ‘b’ go in the short one?”  
  
“The ‘little b’ is the soft sign. It has no sound of its own but tells you in my name the ‘L’ sound is made soft going into the ‘ya’ sound. In the nickname, presumably, you don’t have enough time to worry about that.”  
  
“Huh. And there’s only one ‘L’ in your name.”  
  
“Someone got fancy when they were filling out my American paperwork to come visit over here the first time. I think it was Piotr. And I like how it looks, so I’ve tried to thank him, but he won’t admit it. Maybe it’s too girly for him.”  
  
“Yeah, ‘L’ is a pretty girly consonant,” Kitty snarked. She kissed my cheek and went back to her desk.  
  
The important thing from that afternoon was that Kitty knew what Ilya looked like in Russian—that the “ya” is one letter—so later when I signed my notes with “Ily,” she figured out that it was not a shorter version of “Ilya.” It was instead an abbreviation of, “I love you.”  
  



	3. Code 2: Binary

Kitty liked to phase notes into my pockets. This started from practicality and a way for her to fine-tune phasing small objects. For a while it turned into a competition of adoration. For every note she phased into my pocket, I’d sneak one into an item of clothing I thought she’d wear soon.  
  
We both had to be careful because there were people around so much of the time. I’d pull a note out of my pocket and Doug or Warlock (not so bad because they knew) or Amara or Roberto or Rahne (bad, worse, really bad) would lean over my shoulder and try to read it. You would think, being the demon queen of Limbo, that people would not try to read my notes.  
  
I did, a few times, write myself notes in high demonic. That at least put Rahne off looking over my shoulder, but Amara and Roberto were an unstoppable gossip nexus. Kitty and I had decided that enough people already knew about us and more would be dangerous to our much beloved living arrangement. This might be a non-traditional school, but they still could not let two underage kids live together if they were doing all the things we were frequently doing.  
  
But as tough as my reading-over-the-shoulder situation was, it didn’t compare to Kitty’s. She could end up in the Blackbird with who knows who and pull out a note that piqued everyone’s curiosity. So I got good at writing rather dirty notes that sounded mundane on the surface:  
  
_I’m washing my sheets, want me to do yours?_  
  
(To bring to mind why our sheets needed washing and also the phrase “want me to do you?”)  
  
_Russian saying of the day is: Would I know where I will fall down, I'd lay some straw._  
  
(Written in the fall after we’d fallen into leaves and whatnot in the woods when we were supposed to be tracking but took a little break.)  
  
_I borrowed your lip gloss and it melted in my pants. I’ll get you a new one._  
  
(Lips … pants … melting. You get the idea.)  
  
All of them were signed “ily,” for “I love you,” of course. So Kitty decided to come up with her own coded signature. I found this note in my pocket at the start of history class:  
  
_There’s a sock on my keyboard. I don’t know if it’s yours or how it got there. Do you think it’s sentient?_ — 01011k  
  
(She did know how it got there and was reminding me.)  
  
I thought about going to Warlock for help with the signature, but I wanted to figure it out myself. Zeroes and ones usually meant binary, but I thought binary had more digits. So, off to the library!  
  
01011 in binary was the decimal number 11, but 11 didn’t mean anything special. Neither did 11k. I suppose she could’ve meant 11,000, but that also didn’t mean anything specific to us.  
  
Was it the repeating 01? I went to bed with letters and digits in my brain, still turning them around like bits of a magic spell.  
  
01011  
  
0101  
   
0101 1k  
  
Oh, 1k … 1000 … .01011000  
  
It was late so I teleported into the library to find the book with the binary to ascii character table I’d been looking at the day before.  
  
01011000 was X.  
  
Were the o’s the kisses or the x’s?  
  
I dug through the library until I found in a history book that probably the x’s, which were the kisses, originated as a way to sign documents—and, more interesting, that the o’s possibly came from Jewish immigrants not wanting to sign their names with a symbol that had often represented the cross, so they signed with o’s.  
  
She was signing her notes — Xk for “kisses, Kitty.”  
  
I photocopied the page about x’s and o’s to show Kitty and left it on her desk, signed: 0100111I  
  
A much easier code, since the letter “I” was obviously the last one in the binary code for “O.”  



End file.
